Recently, RoutHost, a Chicago based low cost hosting provider famous for its power friendly packages invited businesses and consumers to explore its server’s options. The service is currently promoting its dedicated servers along with server collocation services for clients looking to relocate.

“RoutHost offers robust, reliable service in a power-friendly facility to minimize carbon offset. Plus, our web hosting plans are bolstered by 24/7 phone and live chat support based in the U.S., so individuals, enterprises, and every client in between can receive rapid technical assistance,” said Levi Staal, CEO of RoutHost.

Routhost is marketing its new collocation service as an affordable way to store and power their client’s existing server hardware. Its low cost hosting plan makes it possible to get benefits from higher bandwidths at lesser expense with the added advantage of increased connection redundancy.

Another popular service of the web hosting company is that their dedicated servers are available for leasing on a month to month basis both for short and long term projects. The low cost hosting service provides reliable power supplies and redundant data back-ups, with excellent customer care.

RoutHost’s dedicated server support lets the clients experience the speed and the reliability without the headache of maintaining their own machinery. It also recommends its clients to get online file backup among other applications.

RoutHost is based in Toronto, Ontario with a data center that connects to the internet via 14 GB Ethernet cables and six distinct backbone providers, with 3Com/Intel NICs, Intel/AMD Processing, and Kingston DDR RAM, among other name-brand features. The green hosting company employs power backups from UPS Systems in conjunction with a Cummins generator.

Cloud computing though a booming industry still feels like an uncharted territory for many. This is because a lot of us still don’t understand the concept clearly. Cloud computing, in a nutshell is an internet based computing system where you pay for only the resources that you use. Cloud computing provides a convenient on-demand network access to a shared space that can be quickly specified and released with minimum interaction.

Cloud’s the limit

The reason behind cloud’s immense presence today is because of the features it possesses. For one, it is predictable meaning it can be accessed anytime , anywhere as long as you have a internet connection.

It is scalable. You can expand it or contract it based upon your needs and requirements. This ensures optimization of the resources. Also the operational cost of the cloud is very low because you only pay of what you use.

How safe is the cloud?

Before you invest in cloud technology, you need to understand its security details, reasons being your sensitive information needs to be kept safe. The following cloud features guarantees you just that:

Cloud‘s shifting feature moves public data to an external cloud to reduce the exposure of your sensitive data.

Clouds are enabled with automated security management which makes the system simpler.

It also has disaster recovery features, which ensures that in case of an emergency, your data is not lost.

On-Demand Security Controls

Real-Time Detection of System Tampering

The downside of these security measures is that you would have to trust a third party with the security. You will also lose any physical control over the security issues regarding the safety of data.

Keep an open mind

Even though it is a well thought out scheme, it certainly has had its failures which have resulted in slow adoption to the new technology. Despite the hoopla surrounding the cloud, various industries are weighing in their options regarding what can be hosted on cloud and what belongs to government owned computers. This has happened after the failures observed by Amazon last year. Experts recommend on keeping an open mind about the cloud and planning efficiently with good service level agreements to use the cloud effectively.

Cloud’s Mission:

The message is clear, cloud’s mission is to provide proper guidelines to new and existing businesses for creation and management to gain maximum value from cloud computing. The bottom line is that the customers should choose the right choice regarding cloud. As Galen Gruman of InfoWorld noted, “Cloud is a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software.”

Setting up a website takes a lot of time and effort from a person. The last thing you would want will be to see all that hard work go to waste. First thing you would do is make sure that your website gets noticed by the users. How? By choosing the right keywords, meaning a certain string of words when entered in the search engine will get your website hits.

What Exactly Are Keywords?

They are the most important SEO element. In simple terms, these are the words people will probably use too search your website. Choosing the right ones is crucial because that is what will put your website in the map and in the forefront.

There are many ways to determine which keywords will get maximum hits and the SEOs do all the analysis, from what users are searching for to what the competitors are searching for and which keywords suit your website.

Choose the right keywords and you have won half the battle:

Today, the web is packed with sites and it is crucial to make a mark for yourself in such a place. Keep a realistic goal- something like achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings.

Let me explain, take a simple example, say your website is about jewellery, try to focus on keywords like “quality stones”, “ Fashion Jewellery”, “statement pieces” rather than on just jewellery. It’s a good idea is because it’s best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords than the more popular one-word ones.

Use’ them liberally:

Once you have chosen the right keyword, it’s time to focus on the content of your website. This content needs to be keyword rich. The density of the keywords used in the content is important as a lot of it and its spam, too little, it won’t show up. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try out a tool like “Keyword Density Checker” to determine the keyword density of your website.

Focus On your Keywords:

Your keyword’s quality is one of the deciding factors on whether your website will show up or not. So try using your keyword on headings, in the title page etc to boost your visibility on the internet. Another thing to remember is that if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!

Do a dry run:

After choosing the keywords, run it by “Google keyword Suggestion Tool”, which will give you related list of keywords. Now all you have to do is shortlist the ones which seem relevant to you and have a global reach.

Finally, don’t get greedy. While SEOs recommend having 5 keywords in the URL, no one wants to remember such a long URL. So just stick to 3 at most and always make sure to use the available tools in the internet to get the best results for your website.

You know it’s time to get a website for yourself when your business is taking off, you have secured a few clients, you have passed the initial hurdles and the only direction you intend to go is forward. The most logical method is to market your product and generate interest among the masses. Marketing plays a very important part in it, most specifically Ads. The easiest way to reach the masses today is by posting ads on the internet. More often than not everyone is on it and this provides you with an excellent opportunity to sell your product. How? Two words- ‘Google Adwords’.

Adwords: Advertising at the next Level:

Google Adwords is Google’s main advertising product and main source of revenue. Adwords is the new revolutionised way of putting your product across to the masses. It offers sweet deals like pay-per-click, site targeted ads, cost-per-thousand ads among others, and they have a worldwide distribution. If you are thinking about giving this a shot, check this tool’s remarkable features and I can assure you will never look back.

Its Ad targeting feature enables you to specify which IP addresses you want to exclude, meaning, where you don’t want your ads to appear. This feature comes handy if you are looking for a specific audience to market your product.

You can also control the frequency of your ads appearing to the same user at any given time. This will give you the exposure you need for your product and put you on the map for your targeted market.

The Best part is that it does your work for you, meaning Google will place your Ads where it’s relevant based on your keyword list. This basically means that if your business is related to car parts manufacturing, your ads won’t appear in websites selling beauty products. The Adsense Publisher work to select channels related to the nature of your ad and places them there, thereby increasing the performance of your ad units.

SEOs: What they do?

The main motive behind using ads is visibility, while Adwords do the easy part for you. It all comes down to choicest keyword that you need to provide so that when the users enter a search term relevant to your website or business, you come on the first page itself. SEOs help out in this case. SEOs are ‘search engine optimisers’, which basically works on improving the visibility of a website in the search engines. SEOs consider how the search engines work, what people search for etc and analyse them to optimise the results. In case of websites, they edit the content and other coding to increase its chances of getting maximum hits.

What to look out for:

Once you have a selection of keywords, it’s time to do a dry run to see how well they work. This is important because more often than not, even after a year of SEOs’ hard work, the website doesn’t reach the first page in the result section.

Now let’s assume that your website did make it to the first page, there is no guarantee that it will get hits from the users. This is primarily because of its failure to reach out in a massive scale. This kind of result is not very uncommon, but the entire process leading up to it is expensive; but if it is launched with an Adword Campaign, it will cost less and will take less than a week to figure out the bounce rate (traffic) of the chosen keywords thereby probably save a lot of SEO efforts.

A well known Web hosting provider- NaviSite announced that it has added new self service storage features which will allow organisations to easily access and store data more efficiently.

These features will provide flexibility to their customers and enable them to pick and choose any features they want from their control panel. This will help the organisations customise their cloud storage solutions as per their requirements.

The 2 features which have been added to NaviCloud’s AppCenter include a self service VM Backup which provides simplified data protection for virtual machines. This also lets users schedule de-duplicated VMbackups and access server images for fast and complete recovery. The 2nd feature allows the IT dept to create NAS appliances for storing and serving files using a point and click user interface. These features are expected to provide a more economic solution.

“We are continuing to add visibility, control and self-service features to NaviCloud’s AppCenter Management Portal,” said Denis Martin, executive vice president and chief technology officer at NaviSite. “The new self-service storage provides customers with improved scalability and performance while enhancing their business continuity storage solutions.”

NaviSite provides a full suite of reliable and scalable managed services, including application services, industry-leading enterprise hosting, and managed cloud services for organizations looking to outsource IT infrastructures and lower their capital and operational costs.

San Antonio based Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing announced that it had been positioned by Gartner in the leader quadrant of the “ magic Quadrant for managed Hosting”

The Gartner assessment basically evaluates providers based on their completeness of their visions and their ability to execute. It categorises the providers in quadrants labelled challengers, visionaries and leaders.

“The year 2011 has been fundamental in several major Rackspace initiatives with the formation of Rackspace Cloud Builders, providing consultative work around OpenStack, and the continued success and growth of RackConnect(TM), Rackspace’s hybrid hosting solution. We consider our leadership position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting providers as further confirmation that Fanatical Support provides great IT outcomes for our customers,” said Lanham Napier, CEO at Rackspace. “2012 is a critical and exciting year for us as we work to advance OpenStack and extend the quality of services we provide our customers. We are obsessed with building a great company, and we’re doing the hard work to build the service leader in cloud computing.”

Rackspace offers hybrid hosting capabilities using its solution rackconnect(TM).Rackspace says, “Most solutions for complex needs are hybrids, mixing different types of infrastructures to achieve cost-effectiveness, and to meet the customer’s range of availability, performance, security and IT operations requirements.

Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack(TM), an open source cloud operating system. it provides Fanatical Support(R) including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg Business Week as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.

RackSpace Hosting Secures Place as ‘Leader’ in the Magic Quadrant

San Antonio based Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing announced that it had been positioned by Gartner in the leader quadrant of the “ magic Quadrant for managed Hosting”

The Gartner assessment basically evaluates providers based on their completeness of their visions and their ability to execute. It categorises the providers in quadrants labelled challengers, visionaries and leaders.

“The year 2011 has been fundamental in several major Rackspace initiatives with the formation of Rackspace Cloud Builders, providing consultative work around OpenStack, and the continued success and growth of RackConnect(TM), Rackspace’s hybrid hosting solution. We consider our leadership position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting providers as further confirmation that Fanatical Support provides great IT outcomes for our customers,” said Lanham Napier, CEO at Rackspace. “2012 is a critical and exciting year for us as we work to advance OpenStack and extend the quality of services we provide our customers. We are obsessed with building a great company, and we’re doing the hard work to build the service leader in cloud computing.”

Rackspace offers hybrid hosting capabilities using its solution rackconnect(TM).Rackspace says, “Most solutions for complex needs are hybrids, mixing different types of infrastructures to achieve cost-effectiveness, and to meet the customer’s range of availability, performance, security and IT operations requirements.

Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack(TM), an open source cloud operating system. it provides Fanatical Support(R) including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg Business Week as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.

The term ‘dedicated server’ does not have anything to do with someone you hired to take care of your whim and requests. It is just a type of web hosting provider for a website.

Usually when a person starts a website say for his business, they most definitely will need a host. A shared server does the trick. This is because, they are cheaper comparatively and a godsend when you are just starting out and can’t afford to spend a lot on a dedicated server. However, once your business takes off, you would want to expand the space for forums, something that a shared server can’t provide, it is then, you should consider getting a dedicated server.

These servers as the name suggests hosts only your website, so all that space is just for you. You can choose to fill it up in any way you want. It also ensures that other websites on the same server won’t be affecting the performance of your own website. It provides highly secure, powerful websites without the cost of having an in-house solution. The best part it is customisable. Also by utilizing dedicated server hosting rather than owning a server you will not need to operate and maintain a data center.

A virtual private server (VPS) on the other hand, is basically when you share the physical server hardware with other websites, but you are allocated a dedicated slice of the system resources. VPS is a good bridge between low cost shared hosting and getting a dedicated server. It has made web hosting affordable and within everyone’s reach.

VPS is cost effective as it allows you to hire only the space you need. Look at it this way, say you want to rent a room, with dedicated servers; you need to rent the entire building just to rent the room whereas in VPS you just rent the room you need.

VPS gives you complete control of your space which includes installing OS, specific applications, software and hardware, much like dedicated servers, but at much lower cost.

One major glitch in the otherwise perfect system is that if your server is generating considerable amount of spam, then the search engines must penalize the entire server. This would affect your speed too.

Now that you have understood the significance of both VPS and a dedicated server, let us look at the major differences between them. This will help you make a better choice for your website.

Dedicated servers come with a huge storage space which would involve a huge financial commitment and if you are not going to need all that space, it’s not a viable option to consider. In case of VPS, you will get only what you asked for. The upside of this arrangement is that you will save quite a bit.VPS and dedicated servers provide complete control of your space but VPS does it cheap.

Dedicated servers are a way to go when you need specific hardware and software to run your site. This is because, these servers allow resources to be accessed and utilized for any given site on the server. These also prove to be quite useful if you need to run multiple sites simultaneously, a feature that VPS doesn’t possess.

Google recently announced that they will be removing websites which don’t add anything useful to the internet users. They have adviced the free web hosting suppliers to follow Google’s preventive tips to avoid it.

The search engine giant took the responsibility to check all the free web hosting sites that are not useful to the internet and fill up the internet space with useless junk. Spam is a huge issue for Google and that’s why Google has taken upon itself to remove all the websites which do not meet their quality standards.

Google suggests that the following steps should be adopted by the entire web hosting community to ensure that their website is not taken off the net:
* Using CAPTCHA to verify only for human submission and prevent the automated scripts from creating sites.
*Keeping track of signups and identifying spam patterns.
*Monitor spam signals including redirects, spam keywords and large number of ad blocks.
* Monitoring phishing and malware-infected pages.
* Watching your server log files for sudden traffic spikes for a newly-created website.

Google maintains that all the above mentioned rules would apply to any website with user generated content besides web designers who are setting up a free website. If a web hosting provider does not follow these models, it would be considered as spam and it would get wiped off the database.

InMotion Hosting recently updated its virtual private hosting plans. This will provide double the memory and transfer bandwidth for the customers. According to the press release, the new products include the VPS-1000, VPS-2000 and VPS-3000, and include a full cPanel/WHM license, enterprise-class Linux OS, RAID 10 high-performance data storage and redundant high-speed network connection.

Web hosts can upgrade their VPS offerings as per the customer’s requirements. Inmotion says its VPS hosting is a good choice for businesses expecting rapid growth, heavy website traffic or who run highly interactive, dynamic websites. At InMotion we are committed to constantly improving our web hosting,” Todd Robinson, CEO of InMotion Hosting said in a statement. “In many cases, particularly with technology, customers may not even realize the work we are doing. This time, though, the improvements in our VPS Hosting line provides significant additional capacity for our customers to use. This is really exciting and, even if our customers don’t require it at the moment, they are ready for growth in the future.

The VPS hosting plan also includes burstable energy- a feature which allows the VPS to scale beyond its dedicated RAM usage during Peak hours. InMotion says its VPS solutions are affordable for businesses that need features like a custom firewall, dedicated mail server or more control over security.

New, up and coming terms like virtualization, data centre and cloud computing are often out of reach for most of us out there but after doing some research, it’s clear to me now that, to understand the concepts, you need to ask the right questions. The obvious one being what is virtualization?

Basically it’s a platform which enables a single user access multiple devices, something like a single computer controlling multiple machines. In other words, we have a system / server where the virtualization platform is installed and on that platform several operating systems are installed. Hence the user can access any of the operating systems at any given time or even simultaneously. To an outsider it looks like 3 different systems are at work while in reality, its only one server.

Virtualization solves a problem of buying and managing a lot of servers at any given time. It saves a lot of trouble in case of a server failure and makes the entire system compact.

To understand the concept much more clearly, consider its 3 subsections, host operating system, the hypervisor, and the guest operating system.

Host OS: it is the original OS with which the virtual machines share all information. The virtualisation platform is installed here.

Hypervisor: It is a program which allows multiple OS to share a single host. This enables the OS to have the host OS’s memory. The hypervisor handles memory allocation and resources of the virtual machines and makes sure that they don’t interfere with each other.

Guest OS: simply put, an OS other than the host OS which is sometimes installed is called a guest OS. It’s usually installed inside the virtual system. For e.g. the OS windows, Linux and MAC are the guest OS on the virtualisation platform of the Host OS.

It is crucial for the virtualisation administrators to monitor and manage the platform resources like I/O traffic diligently. They should make sure that they are optimising the host resources and prevent performance degradation.

Now, there are the different types of virtualization and companies provide specific domain solutions for them. There are essentially three types:

Hardware Virtualization:

This is the most common type implemented in the IT industries as well as in the data centres. The host Server is virtualized and hence allowing the server to be able to run different OS simultaneously on the same hardware.

It has several benefits namely, less no of servers, easier and faster addition of capacity as per needs & less power consumption.

Desktop Virtualization:

This means that the end users(us) data are all stored in a VM(virtual machine) in the hosted environment which can be of the IT ‘s in house or of the data centers. They can be managed in one place for all the users of the company. This process has few takers as it requires a lot of work and takes a lot more planning to execute it.

Storage Virtualization:

Consider this, when a company is growing, it will need more space, even for the servers it’s using, and before you know it , it’s going to increase tenfold. Hence the company needs proper plans for disaster control that’s where this comes to picture. This ensures that multiple storage devices appear as one common media. Storage virtualization takes care of that.

Virtualisation is adopted by honchos like citric and Microsoft but there are other companies like HP, IBM, oracle etc have entered the market. The conclusion is that the more completion in the industry the more affordable it becomes for the end user.